One day in the park, I found a little girl, about four years old, crying by the merry go round. Tears streaming down her dirty cheeks, long braids hanging behind her. I didn't know her; she must have been visiting the neighborhood. I remember the smell of cut grass, the twitch twitch twitch of the night sprinklers coming on. I asked the little girl why she was crying. She said she was lost, that her parents were gone and her sisters were gone and she couldn't find them. She sobbed harder and louder as she told me her story. She gasped and stuttered, snot flew out her nose and she wiped it on her arm. I'm not sure exactly how I felt... though I have thought about this moment many times in recent years. I think I felt sorry for her. But my disgust was stronger. And so was my anger. I told the girl her sisters were gone for good, and that her parents were never coming to get her. I walked home, leaving her all alone as the sun went down. All the kids were on their way home for supper or to watch tv. As the summer noise and heat dissolved into the twilight and quiet cold was settling in the desert grass. I was eight years old. - - - - I was learning how to abandon myself. I was passing it on. I was transferring my feelings. I didn't know I felt abandoned. I didn't know how to feel my own hurt. I was hurting others, and numbing myself. I watched and learned. How to hurt. How not to cry. How not to feel. I realize now that what I did was a reflection of how I felt inside. The lost little girl who wanted her parents. The tenderest, least powerful person I knew, my brother. I poured salt on his wounds, straight out of the shaker. I told him monsters were coming to kill him in the night. The sweet, retarded girl at camp I had befriended, Shannon. My only friend that summer when I was ten. I took a fistful of fine ground black pepper and blew it into her eyes like a kiss. I knew I was like them, somewhere down in my shameful weak little heart. I wanted that tender, powerless person inside me dead. I wanted all tenderness gone. From everyone. I have forgiven myself for these things, mostly. I need to say this loud and clear. I am sorry. I came back to get me. |